I started to respond to Bruce Nall’s comment on yesterday’s post, and realized that my back up regime is complex enough that it might be of general interest. Here is my routine.
Every night I download the CF cards from the day to my computer, using Photo Mechanic, into a dated folder. If it’s my main desktop, it’s a machine with mirrored RAID hard drives. If it’s my laptop, I’ll copy that folder over to the desktop the next day (or if I’m on location, copy it to a portable hard drive). Every night Norton Ghost makes an incremental backup of the entire hard drive onto another drive on the computer.
At the end of the month I convert the files I shot that month to DNG format. Those files get archived onto another computer on the network that is used solely as a file server. It has four 500gb drives in it. I also copy those files onto an IDE hard drive that is connected via a USB. This is the drive that will get unplugged and taken offsite. I archive the original cr2 files, and the accompanying sidecar .xmp files, on DVD. In a busy month I have burned as many as 36 DVDs, though it’s typically 6 to 8. I feel more secure keeping a set of original Canon files—I’m not ready to say that DNG is the be all and end all of digital formats.
I follow a similar backup regime with the master files from the month’s shooting, the ones I have worked on in Photoshop and have corrections and adjustment layers. This also includes any jpgs I have generated from the original files. These are in a separate "Master File" folder for the month.
I have not been able to completely implement a Peter Krogh style bucket backup format. In his regime, all the files get dumped into "buckets" that each are the size of the capacity of a typical DVD. Those sequentially numbered buckets are imported into Iview Media Pro, and that program becomes the only point of entry into the archive. Again, I don’t like limiting my options to a single structure.
If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. It’s routine at this point, but it took a lot of effort to make it habitual and not onerous, which is good enough for me. People will quibble on some points of it. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m a big believer in what Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
wow! That makes me feel like a schlep. I just back up to a portable hard drive. Perhaps I just need to print more...
Posted by: Earl | August 20, 2006 at 10:28 AM